8 comments:

Is it just me or was everyone trying to find a Shredder replacement in the mid/late 90's?

Lord Dregg replaces him in the original cartoon, Dragon Lord replaces him in Next Mutation. Its like back then everyone had felt Shredder had gotten old or run his course, that they kept bringing in this new big bad villain out of nowhere.

It was weird to say the least, he was even gone for the majority of the Archie run at that time.

I had a similar reaction, when I finally viewed the series properly, last year, via my local library's DVDs. I saw very little of the Next Mutation as a teen in 1997, partially due to time and other pressing concerns (Beast Wars, Daria, the ability to finally watch MST3K full-time on Sci-Fi Channel ate up a lot of my attention), but there were other considerations in play. For example, I was rather angry about Saban's Eagle Riders adaptation and unfairly thought Saban bastardized the Turtles as well, just as I felt it bastardized Gatchaman (and this is from someone who has major fondness toward the "G-Force: Guardians of Space" dub, flawed as that was). Moreover, having re-engaged with the Fred Wolf series right before it ended and not being happy over the cancellation, that didn't help matters. Bad timing all around, I suppose.

After re-discovering the Fred Wolf series on DVD and my adult self rather enjoying that, thought it was time to see if it could happen again with the Next Mutation. For the most part, I'd say so, as, barring the occasional dodgy execution as Mark laid out, it actually has some truly interesting ideas and characters -- see, Mirage, Vam Mi proves you can have interesting vampire villains in TMNT, plus I'm quite over my Venus issues, if I had any. And we need more Bonesteel and Scott McNeil's crazy awesome performance in our lives.

"Of course, having the new character show how awesome she is by easily defeating the most powerful/popular villain of the series is a cheap trope, but they REALLY needed to sell the idea of Girl Turtle to the audience so I can’t blame them."

Indeed, I'll gladly take Venus' version of one-shotting the Shredder vs. Ninjara's, any day. How interesting that Venus mind crushed Shredder long before Yu-Gi-Oh made it cool (when Yami Yugi did it to Seto Kaiba and many other manga characters).

"Kirby Morrow’s Michelangelo is an alright radical youth. The surfer dude aspect is downplayed to almost being nonexistent, and instead he plays Mikey as being frustratingly horny. Admittedly, that’s probably the scriptwriter’s fault, but Morrow’s Mikey just wants to get laid SO BAD YOU GUYS."

After listening to Morrow's Rad from Transformers Armada/Energon and his Cyclops from X-Men Evolution, I thought it's rather interesting to have him voice a character that wasn't so straitlaced, for a change. Maybe they were trying to avoid typecasting? More or less agree about Hill, though.

Can't think of anything else to say beyond "Good review, as always," Can't wait for the next batch.

You are bold and thorough, sir! I found it a solid read. You are probably right that it's the nicest thing anybody has ever said about the show in a long time. Seems like the screencaps are from low resolution tapes though. I'm guessing you used Youtube or something?